8 February 2012 Last updated at 10:28 GMT By Juliana Liu BBC News, Hong Kong
A recent advert has brought simmering tensions to the fore
The full-page colour advertisement depicting a giant locust overlooking Hong Kong's skyline is a striking representation of the recent surge in anti-China feeling here.

A group of Hong Kong residents raised money online to fund the advert, which was published in the popular Apple Daily newspaper.

It depicted mainland visitors as locusts, amid growing tension over an influx of visitors.

Fifteen years after Hong Kong rejoined China, the gulf separating citizens in the former British colony and those on the mainland appears to be widening.

The two groups share a common written language and culture. But differences in the spoken dialect, politics, economic standing and even personal hygiene have ignited a series of very public disagreements.

These have ranged from who gets preferential treatment at luxury shops to how to behave on the subway and who has the right to give birth in Hong Kong.

Author Xu Xi says tensions are rooted in misunderstanding

Xu Xi, a widely published author and writer-in-residence at the City University in Hong Kong, said recent confrontations were the result of long-simmering tensions.

"Hong Kong people welcomed the handover with open arms. But over time, we realised that we simply moved from one colonial master to another," she said.

"There is a great deal of misunderstanding on both sides. On a daily basis, I see it and I hear it."

'Bumpkins'

Hong Kong was a Crown colony for 150 years until 1997, when it was returned to China.

The city is governed under the "one country, two systems" policy. It is largely free to run its own internal affairs, whilst Beijing sets foreign and defence policy.

Since the handover, the number of mainland visitors to Hong Kong has surged.

Last year, the city hosted 28 million tourists from mainland China. That is four times the entire population of Hong Kong.

Many come primarily to shop. Unlike the mainland, Hong Kong has no sales tax, so it is usually much cheaper to buy here, particularly when it comes to designer clothing, status handbags and high-end electronics.

Protests took place outside Dolce & Gabbana in January
In areas such as Tsim Sha Tsui, where Western luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton and Dolce & Gabbana have set up shop, the predominate dialect heard on the street is Mandarin, rather than the local Cantonese.

The Dolce & Gabbana store was the site of protests in January after word spread online that security guards there allowed only mainland tourists to take photos.

The protests, which eventually shut the store and forced Dolce & Gabbana to apologise, highlighted feelings among Hong Kong residents that wealthy mainlanders were getting special treatment.

Gordon Mathews, an anthropologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, says envy definitely plays a role.

"Thirty years ago, mainland people were 'achan' - they were thought to be country bumpkins. And now the richest people in Hong Kong are tourists from the mainland, or investors from the mainland," he said.

"That's rather shocking and upsetting to many people in Hong Kong, and I think that is an underlying reason for these kinds of protests that we see."

Subway fight

On average, Hong Kong people are still much wealthier than their mainland cousins.

But the conspicuous consumption displayed by the sheer number of Chinese millionaires and billionaires shopping in Hong Kong has been upsetting locals for years.

There is also a feeling that, even as mainlanders get wealthier, their manners and etiquette leave room for improvement.

Bruce Lee says many mainland visitors do not give anything back
In January, a mobile phone video of a shouting match between mainlanders and locals on the Hong Kong subway went viral on the internet.

A young mainland girl visiting Hong Kong with her mother was caught eating dried noodles on the subway, where eating is not allowed. Security was called and a very public row ensued.

Mainlanders accused locals of bullying, while Hong Kong residents insisted the visitors were rude and paid no heed to hygiene in a densely populated city.

Anthropologist Gordon Mathews says that as a white American he would have been forgiven for not knowing the rules.

Hong Kong bloggers say the real issue is that the passenger who politely asked the young girl to stop eating was ridiculed for speaking poor Mandarin.

After the video was widely shared, a professor at Peking University called some Hong Kong people "British running dogs" for looking down on mainlanders, triggering a protest by about 100 residents at the Beijing liaison office.

Wang Yiting, a mainland student attending university in Hong Kong, says she understood the reasons behind the protest.

"It makes me feel very uncomfortable, but I can understand why Hong Kong people are so angry with us," she said.

Birth tourism

Hong Kong residents are also incensed about a surge in birth tourism, which they say is straining the medical system and putting lives at risk.

In the past 10 years the number of mainland women crossing the border to give birth has soared.

Almost half of all babies born in Hong Kong in 2010 were the children of mainland couples, according to government figures.

Ethnic Chinese babies born in Hong Kong automatically receive the right to live and work here, as well as the right to carry a Hong Kong passport, which makes international travel easier.

Some mainlanders also choose to give birth in Hong Kong to skirt the one-child policy, which can result in heavy fines for violators.

The Hong Kong government has already imposed quotas on the number of mainland mothers allowed to give birth in local hospitals, but residents say the quotas do not go far enough.

Bruce Lee, a 21-year-old university student, has roots in eastern China.

Still he considers himself a Hong Kong person first and foremost, and was one of the many donors who funded the "locust" advert.

"Some of these people come to Hong Kong in order to enjoy the benefits that this city offers without giving anything back," he said in between classes at the Hong Kong Baptist University.

"They are basically stealing from us, taking advantage of what locals have created through hard work."

Both Hong Kong and mainland officials are promising to crack down on birth tourism.

The head of Guangdong province's family planning department has told reporters that anyone caught going to Hong Kong to evade the one-child policy will be punished.

One lawmaker, Albert Chan of the People Power coalition, is even planning to introduce a new bill in the Legislative Council making it almost impossible for mainland women to give birth in Hong Kong.

"The situation is in such a terrible state," he said. "Sooner or later, because there isn't enough medical staff to deal with so many women giving birth, local women may find their lives in danger."

The Hong Kong government is facing calls by other politicians to re-evaluate its immigration policy.

It is a sign that after 15 years, despite all the financial support Beijing offers Hong Kong, the city is not completely embracing a return to the motherland.

This anti-china sentiment in HongKong pretty much parallels the China's arrival at the world stage and negative feeling of the world about the China much like a village bumpkin who is suddenly rich but with no etiquettes befitting his millionaire/billionaire status.

The Chinese run into same unwelcome situation in Taiwan as well due to their behaviour when it comes to talking on the phone or forming a line in the hotel lobby. I will try to locate a video news clip and post it later on.

Reuters

TAIPEI | Fri Jul 22, 2011 6:12am EDT

(Reuters) - Five tourists from mainland China who tried to save $70 in taxi fares during a trip to Taiwan sparked a police alert over a possible kidnapping last week when a motorist spotted one of them in the trunk of the taxi.

The five, visiting relatives in Taiwan, had not wanted to take two taxis to save money, and persuaded the driver to let one of them travel in the trunk, Yu Chung-fa, a senior officer in the Hsinchu County police in northern Taiwan, said on Friday.

But another motorist saw a hand sticking out of the trunk of the taxi on a highway near the city of Hsinchu on July 15, and, suspecting a kidnapping, called police.

It was "a misunderstanding", however, and the passenger had been keeping the trunk open for ventilation, Yu said.

The driver was fined T$3,000 for breaching traffic regulations. No action was taken against the tourists, Yu said. He did not say how they continued their journey.

Taiwan has been allowing mainland tourists in since 2008 as ties between the two political rivals warm after six decades of hostility. The opening has led to a boom for Taiwan's economy, with the visitors spending an estimated $7 billion so far.

Last month individual mainland tourists were allowed in for the first time in addition to organised groups, a decision that stirred some concern in Taiwan over whether the visitors would abscond or misbehave.

(HONG KONG) â€” The argument began over the seemingly minor offense of eating on the subway, which is banned in Hong Kong. A local commuter was outraged that a girl in a tour group from mainland China was spilling noodles onto the floor.

In a video clip that has gone viral, the commuter hits an emergency stop button to alert subway staff.

"I told them they can't eat on the subway," the man tells the subway worker who answers the call. "But then they yelled at me. Hey! This is Hong Kong!" The commuter demands an apology from the girl's mother. She refuses and the argument explodes, with both sides screaming at each other.

The quarrel, between two groups speaking mutually unintelligible dialects of Chinese, isn't just about manners. It also illustrates how â€” 15 years after this former British colony was handed back to China â€” Hong Kongers feel less Chinese and more an island unto themselves than ever as they face a growing influx of visitors from the mainland.

And that's a headache for the political masters in Beijing, who are concerned about the threat of disloyalty in the semiautonomous territory and are lashing out against the notion of a separate Hong Kong identity.

Other events also have highlighted the split between Hong Kongers and mainland visitors, who are frequently derided as "locusts" for their voracious buying of everything from apartments to luxury goods to baby formula.

A regular poll found the sense of Hong Kong identity surging. A flood of pregnant mainland women crossing into the city solely to give birth has strained tensions. Even the U.S. consul general has been dragged into the debate after praising Hong Kong for sticking to the "one country, two systems" principle. A well-known Beijing scholar turned up the heat by calling Hong Kongers "dogs" and "bastards."

Hong Kong, which returned to Chinese control in 1997 after more than 150 years as a British colony, is still a global financial center. It's also a special administrative region with Western-style rights and freedoms not seen in mainland China, most notably freedom of speech and the rule of law.

Local councillors and half the legislature are elected by voters while a pro-Beijing committee chooses Hong Kong's leader, though direct elections have been promised as early as 2017.

Beijing's fear is that if Hong Kong continues to have an excessively vibrant culture of its own, it could prompt residents to press for a faster pace of democratization that could lead to a non-pro-Beijing figure elected as the city's leader.

"All this is anathema to the Chinese Communist Party," said Willy Lam, a professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Lam said China's rulers have been obsessed about maintaining control in Hong Kong since July 2003, when more than half a million people took to the streets â€” in a massive rally that took Beijing by surprise â€” to protest against proposed anti-subversion legislation.

Chinese officials and pro-Beijing papers have even lashed out at the top U.S. diplomat in Hong Kong as they fret about subversion. The papers accused U.S. Consul-general Stephen Young of supporting groups trying to break Hong Kong away from China. They point to his previous posting in Kyrgyzstan in 2005 during a pro-democracy uprising there and also accuse him of supporting Taiwan's independence during a posting to the island.

And a Beijing official based in the territory dismissed a Hong Kong University poll in December as "illogical" after it found that the number of people identifying themselves as being Hong Kong citizens had hit a 10-year high while those identifying themselves as Chinese citizens slumped to a 12-year low.

The attacks are signs Beijing is trying to stop Hong Kongers from clinging to their cultural, political and linguistic differences, Lam said.
"Beijing is confident that since it controls the Hong Kong economy â€” and the loyalty of the great majority of Hong Kong business owners â€” it can afford to use apparently draconian measures to suppress what it regards as the inordinate expansion of Hong Kong identity," he said.

Those measures include attempts to introduce Chinese patriotism lessons in schools, preventing dissidents from entering the city and using Hong Kong's pro-Beijing press to attack people or groups it deems unfriendly.

While Hong Kongers and mainlanders are both ethnically Chinese, people in the city on the southern edge of China tend to look down on their mainland brethren as uncouth and uncultured. What's new is that many of the mainlanders flooding into Hong Kong nowadays are now much wealthier â€” and their influence much greater â€” thanks to the country's emergence as the world's second-biggest economy.
Italian fashion house Dolce & Gabbana stirred local anger after reports it was banning Hong Kongers from taking photos of one of its boutiques while allowing wealthy mainland shoppers to snap away. D&G later apologized.

"I don't have a problem with mainlanders per se, but in the past year they've been coming to Hong Kong to give birth and then leaving without paying their fees. They're taking our resources but they're not paying Hong Kong back," griped Sun Wong, an 18-year-old student. "It offends me."

Nearly 33,500 children were born in Hong Kong last year to parents who both live on the mainland, up from 620 in 2001. Many are trying to escape China's one-child policy but Hong Kongers complain they also take up hospital beds that should go to locals.
Kong Qingdong, a Peking University professor, stirred the pot by lambasting Hong Kong residents, calling them "dogs" and other insults during a six-minute, obscenity-laden rant on an Internet chat show.

"To this day, even though Hong Kong has been returned, its heart hasn't returned completely and there are still many running dogs," said Kong, a 73rd-generation descendant of Confucius. He blasted Hong Kongers as traitors to China with low morals and said the city would be in trouble if China stopped supplying food and drinking water.

"Can you find your English daddy?" he sneered.

Members of a popular Internet forum raised more than HK$100,000 ($12,900) to take out a full-page newspaper ad last week urging the Hong Kong government to change rules so that children born to parents who are both mainland residents â€” known as "double negatives" â€” don't automatically get right of abode. The ad featured a giant locust overlooking the city.

Wong, the student, joined a handful of mostly young people in a recent flash-mob style protest by walking down a high-end shopping street popular with mainland tourists and singing Cantonese pop songs with lyrics rewritten with references to locusts.

As they lined up to get into the glitzy Gucci and Louis Vuitton boutiques, the shoppers â€” who speak the Mandarin Chinese common in the rest of the country â€” took little notice.

i dont know whether some of them anti-china or not.but i am sure the article mixed anti-mainlander and anti-china up.

for example,"Subway fight" "Birth tourism",this two parts.i am quite sure this situation is just like:a Beijing local does not like people from other place.cause they compete with locals on jobs,education,medical treatment and many other aspects.though i admit many mainlanders' bad behavior give Hong kongers a bad impression,what hongkongers do can not be regarded as anti-china.anti-china means they want a independence.do they all want a independence?

this event is some kind of Regional discrimination.and this can also happen in big cities like New York,Tokyo,London.

The quarrel, between two groups speaking mutually unintelligible dialects of Chinese,

Click to expand...

I hope the Chinese posters will now admit what I have been always saying that the Chinese language which they claim is the same all understand is not so (as I have been saying) and that one part of China does not understand another part!

Therefore, who is spreading falsehood or obfuscating is now proved by this news, written by a Chinese reporter from Hong Kong.

This is reason why people don't believe the Chinese posters when they state something, since they hide the truth! And so one does not know what really is the truth and what is blatant falsehood.

The Chinese run into same unwelcome situation in Taiwan as well due to their behaviour when it comes to talking on the phone or forming a line in the hotel lobby. I will try to locate a video news clip and post it later on.

Reuters

TAIPEI | Fri Jul 22, 2011 6:12am EDT

(Reuters) - Five tourists from mainland China who tried to save $70 in taxi fares during a trip to Taiwan sparked a police alert over a possible kidnapping last week when a motorist spotted one of them in the trunk of the taxi.

The five, visiting relatives in Taiwan, had not wanted to take two taxis to save money, and persuaded the driver to let one of them travel in the trunk, Yu Chung-fa, a senior officer in the Hsinchu County police in northern Taiwan, said on Friday.

But another motorist saw a hand sticking out of the trunk of the taxi on a highway near the city of Hsinchu on July 15, and, suspecting a kidnapping, called police.

It was "a misunderstanding", however, and the passenger had been keeping the trunk open for ventilation, Yu said.

The driver was fined T$3,000 for breaching traffic regulations. No action was taken against the tourists, Yu said. He did not say how they continued their journey.

Taiwan has been allowing mainland tourists in since 2008 as ties between the two political rivals warm after six decades of hostility. The opening has led to a boom for Taiwan's economy, with the visitors spending an estimated $7 billion so far.

Last month individual mainland tourists were allowed in for the first time in addition to organised groups, a decision that stirred some concern in Taiwan over whether the visitors would abscond or misbehave.

I hope the Chinese posters will not admit what I have been always saying that the Chinese language which they claim is the same all understand is not so (as I have been saying) and that one part of China does not understand another part!

Therefore, who is spreading falsehood or obfuscating is now proved by this news, written by a Chinese reporter from Hong Kong.

This is reason why people don't believe the Chinese posters when they state something, since they hide the truth! And so one does not know what really is the truth and what is blatant falsehood.

Click to expand...

Well, Ray, obviously you have misunderstanding what is a lanaguage and what is the dialect.
Mandrin and Cantoness are the same lanaguage and different dialect. For myself, I barely understand what those hongongness speak, but I can fully understand what they write without any specific training.

This reporter didn't proved anything except a fact - after 150 years colonial history, Hongkong and mainland do have many differences to overcome.

The resaon that INDIANS don't believe the chinese posters is that you guys never planned to accept any truth which doesn't suit you. How many chinese posters have been labelled with "CCP propoganda" or "brainwashed" after you cannot prove their opinions to be wrong.

Ray, you are a professional military officer, but you are not china-problem expert. You have a little bit knowledge about china, but you don't have enough to make any reasonable judgement. It is better for you start listen first instead of rush into your own judgement.

I hope the Chinese posters will not admit what I have been always saying that the Chinese language which they claim is the same all understand is not so (as I have been saying) and that one part of China does not understand another part!

Therefore, who is spreading falsehood or obfuscating is now proved by this news, written by a Chinese reporter from Hong Kong.

This is reason why people don't believe the Chinese posters when they state something, since they hide the truth! And so one does not know what really is the truth and what is blatant falsehood.

Click to expand...

Ray, do you even speak Cantonese?

Well, I do. For the very basic, Cantonese uses exact same set of written language as Mandarin. It is actually closer to ancient tongue of Chinese language because it include æµŠéŸ³(a more muddy sound). If you did some more research, you will find out that the region is conquer during Qin Dynasty that is 2000 years ago. Since its greater distance from nomadic group in the north, its tongue is preserved. It even use many ancient form of word such as èª¿ç¾¹ for spoon. Again, it is a region that is conquer for over 2000 yrs. The issue should be settled, the founding father of Republic of China, regarded as father of modern China(åœ‹çˆ¶ï¼‰ by both ROC and PRC, å­«ä¸­å±± Sun yat sen, are from Guangdong, and speak Cantonese.

i dont know whether some of them anti-china or not.but i am sure the article mixed anti-mainlander and anti-china up.

for example,"Subway fight" "Birth tourism",this two parts.i am quite sure this situation is just like:a Beijing local does not like people from other place.cause they compete with locals on jobs,education,medical treatment and many other aspects.though i admit many mainlanders' bad behavior give Hong kongers a bad impression,what hongkongers do can not be regarded as anti-china.anti-china means they want a independence.do they all want a independence?

this event is some kind of Regional discrimination.and this can also happen in big cities like New York,Tokyo,London.

Click to expand...

Have you taken any polls whether Hong Kong people want to stay as apart of China or want independence? You can only speak after you have done some home work. Try to put your self in their place than make a misleading statement. People in mainland China should be taught the way people live outside the mainland China. What happens in Hong Kong, we observe the same kind of behaviour in North America by visitors and immigrants like wise.

Have you taken any polls whether Hong Kong people want to stay as apart of China or want independence? You can only speak after you have done some home work. Try to put your self in their place than make a misleading statement. People in mainland China should be taught the way people live outside the mainland China. What happens in Hong Kong, we observe the same kind of behaviour in North America by visitors and immigrants like wise.

Click to expand...

it is the word "anti-china" in the title misleading. i was trying to tell everyone that "anti-mainlander" is better than "anti-china" here.